Guest post by Linux 4.4 has been released This release adds support for 3D support in virtual GPU driver, which allows 3D hardware-accelerated graphics in virtualization guests; loop device support for Direct I/O and Asynchronous I/O, which saves memory and increases performance; support for Open-channel SSDs, which are devices that share the responsibility of the Flash Translation Layer with the operating system; the TCP listener handling is completely lockless and allows for faster and more scalable TCP servers; journalled RAID5 in the MD layer which fixes the RAID write hole; eBPF programs can now be run by unprivileged users, and perf has added support for eBPF programs aswell; a new mlock2() syscall that allows users to request memory to be locked on page fault; and block polling support.
There are also new drivers and many other small improvements. Here is the full list of changes.
That’s something I’ve been waiting for. Having accelerated desktop in KVM is nice. Does it work with Nvidia closed driver used in the host system?
Edited 2016-01-11 23:03 UTC
I very much doubt it. I’d wait until Nvidia’s driver plays nicely enough with KMS, DRM, etc. to support Wayland.
Yes, I’ve suspected that much as well.
Here’s some videos of it being done.
This one uses Unraid to configure 2 gaming VM’s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuJYMCbIbPk&user=LinusTechTips
This guys uses Arch as his Desktop (using onboard GPU) and has a Windows VM to run games using an AMD GPU.
https://teksyndicate.com/videos/gta-v-linux-skylake-build-hardware-v…
If you want to learn about how this is all done this is the best link I know of and has links to other sites.
This one again is using Unraid, but it actually makes the PC be a NAS and gaming PC all in one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpXhSrhmUXo&user=LinusTechTips
This one is ridiculous.. SEVEN gaming VM’s using one PC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXOaCkbt4lI
Of course to do this you need a CPU and motherboard that supports vt-d.
Edited 2016-01-12 03:36 UTC
Your examples are using PCI passthrough, it’s not the same as virt-gpu (with Virgil3D) mentioned in the article above which is creating a virtual GPU.
Virtual GPU does not need additional hardware, it emulates (virtualizes) the GPU using available capabilities of the host video card.
In contrast, passthrough means that actual additional hardware is used by the guest system (that’s why they had several video cards in those examples).
Edited 2016-01-12 03:44 UTC
A lot of sites I’ve read that Nvidia drivers will stop working if they detect that they’re in a VM. However I have seem it done.. /shrug
Also, the video card would not be installed on the “host”. You would assign to the VM and then in the Guest OS install the driver. So far if you do this the video card would not be usable by the Host machine, only with the assigned guest/VM.
Edited 2016-01-12 03:36 UTC
I’m talking about host system using Nvidia driver, and guest system (run through KVM) using the virtual GPU driver which is now supposedly supporting 3D acceleration (through the host card naturally). I assume it should work with DRM / KMS drivers on the host, but Nvidia closed driver is a different beast.
Edited 2016-01-12 03:47 UTC